Saturday, September 30, 2017

I believe my earlier back to school post was a bit premature. So I decided to create a new post! We have been in school a couple of weeks now, and are finally finding ourselves in a groove! So here's a more updated Back to School post!
First our exciting news!
We finally have a school room!!!
I'm telling you, we haven't had a school room in YEARS. Last year we were in a 2br Apartment! and we have honestly spent most of our school years around our dining room table, which has been fine. However, at this season in our lives we find ourselves in a big enough place, so I wanted to share our school room!

Thursday, April 6, 2017

Math. Not my favorite subject. Not even close. When I was in school, I never remember enjoying math. I did get into the higher math classes in high school somehow, but still struggled when I was in college. No, math was never my strong suit, nor was it something that I really enjoyed teaching.
When it came to homeschooling my kids, naturally math was one area that I was never overly confident in. Math in the lower grades was easy breezy. Then we began 7th grade math. Yikes....
We started 7th grade math with Life of Fred. That was working really well for my elementary age daughter, so we began with Fractions and Decimals just to make sure we covered all of the ground that I needed too. About 2/3 of the way through Fractions I realized it wasn't working. Even worse, I was having *so* much trouble explaining exactly what was going wrong. Homeschooling two other kids made it even more difficult to take the time I needed to reteach myself how to do math... I really needed some help!

Tuesday, March 7, 2017

In all of our history of homeschooling, which comes to a total of about six years (Wow! How did that even happen!) we have focused primarily on American History. If I'm going to be honest with you, it's because that is simply what is in my comfort zone. It's a far smaller span of time to study than the ancient civilizations, and in all honesty, it's what I learned the most about in my education. However, we are certainly coming to the end of our American history lessons, and as my kids get older they become more fascinated and curious about other areas of the world. So I think it's safe to say it's time to revamp our history curriculum to give them a broader view of the world around us!

We have done a lot of dry curriculum. I really wanted to try something different. My kids are very hands-on learners, which is why so many of our curriculum choices work so well! However, I'm not great at planning and putting things into words myself, and need a good curriculum that's capable of basically drawing it all out for me. I love it when it takes the work away and tells me exactly what to do. Especially with multiple homeschoolers on different grade levels, it's important that I have enough time to dedicate to each learner. So this is what I was looking for as I began my search for some sort of world history program.

When we were given the opportunity to try and review the Ancient Greece project from Homeschool in the Woods, I was just as excited as my kids were about stepping outside of my comfort zone to learn about something completely new to us! Where better to start in world history than at the very beginning, learning about ancient civilizations! So we received the hands-on Project Passport: Ancient Greece, and we were ready to begin!

disclaimer: I was given the product for free in exchange for an honest review of the product itself! However that did not affect my response written about the product. It really is amazing!! Post also includes affiliate links!

Friday, February 24, 2017

Isn't it great when two of your favorite things come together to make one! You know, like peanut butter and chocolate, or the sand and the ocean... or particularly this week, books and springtime!!! We have enjoyed fantastic weather here in western NC the past week, and although its still 'winter', it feels so much like spring! Easter Lilly's are blooming along the road, there's the chirping of birds to wake me up in the morning. Springtime feels like its here! And although there may be a few more cold, and perhaps even snowy days remaining, we know that spring is just around the corner! How better to celebrate than some amazing spring books!!!

Eric Carle has been one of my favorite artists since I was a child. I remember fondly watching Reading Rainbow in those early years and being fascinated by his use of color and paint techniques to fill a space. A modern-day artist, with incredible talent! And yes, I say artist, because although he is a fantastic author of children's books, he's equally as talented with his color and illustrations. I just love Eric Carle, and his bright artwork makes his books standalone works in children's literature to be loved through the ages!

This week I unpacked some of our favorite Eric Carle books and visited our local library in search of some more. I wanted to pour this artist into my sweet kiddos, and for them to enjoy every moment of it! The bold colors, the fantastical stories about the smallest parts of nature that they will soon be outside enjoying! We were all excited about this study, these books, and the artsy stuff to go along with it!

The first book we chose was little brother's favorite book ever. The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

We also had an extra special treat! I found a youtube video of Eric Carle himself reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar! My kiddos especially loved hearing this!

Next we began on our craft for the story!

Big Sis is an artist, so we keep a lot of acryllic paints on hand. We are very fond of the Apple Barrel paints that we get at Walmart for only .50 cents a piece! I also picked up some paper plates to use for some of our other crafts, and we used those as our palletes. For this project though, we didn't use paint brushes, we used a chopped up potato!

We made green circles for his body, and a red circle for his face!

While we were waiting on our heads and bodies to dry, we enjoyed watching the Very Hungry Caterpillar on Netflix!

We finished up our project with a fine paint brush to give him eyes and antena, and we have some very hungry cateripllars!!!

Our next fun spring book we visited was the Grouchy Ladybug

My kiddos laughed and laughed at this book as the grouchy ladybug crosses the land to find somebody who wants to fight with him! But in the end, he becomes more friendly and finds the friendly ladybug was willing to share all along. Such a cute book, with fantastic colors and vivid animals! We loved it!

We used our same potato stamp paint method to make a page of ladybugs!

For our last book this week, we read the Tiny Seed!

For this project we took out the paintbrushes, and painted a scene of a sky and land onto a paper plate!

Next, we added painted popsicle sticks for stems, and silk flowers that I picked up at Walmart onto the plates!

Now I have some beautiful spring gardens to hang on my wall!!!

Please come back next week as we study more of Eric Carles work! Next week we will be reading the Very Busy Spider and the Artist Who Painted a Blue Horse, learning to paint like Eric Carle, and learning a bit of art history on the inspiration behind Carle's work in the Blue Horse book. I can't wait! Hope you'll come back!

Join me and my friends over at the iHomeschool Network to find out some fun spring book ideas!